"When you have money, it’s always smart to diversify your investments. That way if one of them goes south, you don’t lose everything. It’s also smart to diversify your identity, to invest your self-esteem and what you care about into a variety of different areas — business, social life, relationships, philanthropy, athletics — so that when one goes south, you’re not completely screwed over and emotionally wrecked." ― Tim Ferriss.
The Jack of all Trades proverb is a great symbol of the divide that exists between the people who have reached massive success, and people who reached massive comfort and compliance.
Leonardo da Vinci was not only an artist, he was also a scientist, an inventor and an architect.
Isaac Newton was not only a physicist, he was a philosopher, theologian, astronomer, alchemist and a mathematician.
Paul Leroy Robeson - Yes the singer- was also a professional athlete, a civil rights activist, writer, multi-lingual orator, lawyer and actor.
And the list goes on and on...
But these are antiquated examples, these things don’t happen anymore. Or so they say.
Nowadays, whenever you acquire an additional skill, a laser descends from the sky and removes all the other skills that you previously had, right?
I'm just kidding of course.
So if you’re good with coding, why shouldn't you learn a little about economy and compound those two skills into something revolutionary?
Well, because rumor has it that the Jack of all of Trades...
You don’t know Jack!
Holger Geschwindner was what they called a mad scientist, he was a simple physicist that said that he could take any teenager with average height and make them one of the best basketball players in the world within seven years.
Obviously, nobody believed him.
Stick to physics, Einstein!
Holger set his sight on a young Basketball player in small town in Germany and mentored him while using a lot of unusual training methods that looked more scientific than anything sport related really.
Noise control, optimal shot curve, integral calculus... Everyone thought that Geschwindner went completely nuts.
Furthermore, he wanted the kid to exercise his mind and gave him books to read, instruments to play and in occasions also took him to the opera.
But wait, what does basketball has to do with literature or music anyways?
While it may be easy to pull the Jack card at first sight , what was actually happening is that Holger was giving the kid a brilliant strategic advantage over his contemporaries.
Seven years later that young man won the NBA championship ring with the Dallas Mavericks.
That young man was Dirk Nowitzki.
“ Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.”
Said Justine Musk when asked about the most important thing she learned from Elon Musk.
I’m not gonna lie, this is probably my most biased post to date.
I honestly think it’s a self-limiting belief that people impose on themselves for no good reason other than "everyone else believes it".
Like the great comedian Doug Stanhope likes to say:
“It’s dead people’s baggage, quit carrying it”
But as I said, I am biased. I always found myself attracted towards people who condone or encourage having more than one skill.
Tim Ferriss, Neil Strauss, James Altucher… Everyone that I admired and followed for years has immersed themselves in new worlds and never shied away from learning new skills.
There is a reason why podcasts are so damn popular, because you invite top performers with all sorts of skills and you always learn something from all them.
And more importantly, you connect, you learn from each other and in the future you may even collaborate in bringing something beautiful into the world.
In a world that keeps changing, what possible wisdom could you find in investing all your skills in one domain? Before, change was slow, painfully slow. It took centuries to get to machinery, the printing press or irrigation.
These days you blink and you find yourself beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.